Secrets of the Deep

The dispute over what may be the biggest sunken treasure ever found.

As more submerged artifacts become accessible, countries have begun to challenge the “finders keepers” concept.Credit BRUCE MCCALL

One morning last October, the Explorer, a two-hundred-and-fifty-one-foot ship owned by Odyssey Marine Exploration, an American deep-sea treasure-hunting company, left the Port of Gibraltar and headed out to sea. On the horizon, three miles away, sat a Spanish warship. “They’re waiting for us,” Aladar Nesser, Odyssey’s director of international business development, told the Explorer’s passengers, among them twelve journalists who had been invited on board to witness what Odyssey’s owners expected would be a tense confrontation with Spanish authorities.

In May, Odyssey had announced that it had discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a colonial-era shipwreck that had yielded seventeen tons of silver coins and several hundred gold ones—possibly the largest treasure ever recovered from the sea. The company had transferred the booty to five hundred and fifty-one plastic buckets, loaded them onto a chartered jet, and flown them to the United States from Gibraltar, a British territory. Odyssey, claiming not to know the wreck’s identity, and citing a need to protect it from looters, had given it the code name Black Swan and refused to divulge either its location—other than to say that it is “beyond the territorial waters” of any country—or details about the treasure. In July, however, the Spanish government obtained copies of export documents filed by Odyssey in Gibraltar, which revealed that the recovered coins were Spanish. A Spanish court, investigating whether Odyssey had plundered a national historical site, ordered that the Explorer be seized when it left Gibraltar waters.

As the Explorer’s captain, Sterling Vorus, steered toward the warship, two smaller vessels—patrol boats from the Guardia Civil—appeared, aiming for the ship’s port side. Vorus made radio contact with the captain of one of the boats, who ordered him to follow them to Algeciras, Spain, across the bay.

“Can you confirm that you are ordering me, against my consent, under threat of deadly force?” Vorus asked.

His radio emitted a crackle of static. Marie Rogers, a lawyer for Odyssey, who was standing beside Vorus and listening closely to the exchange, nodded. Vorus said into the radio, “We will coöperate with your orders.”

An hour later, the Explorer docked in the port of Algeciras, at a pier where several Guardia Civil officers stood waiting. Eventually, a group of officers boarded the ship and examined the passengers’ passports. Vorus was charged with “severe disobedience” and jailed for the night. The Explorer was taken into Spanish custody for three days and searched. Odyssey had long since stripped the boat of documents and equipment that could provide clues to the identity or location of the Black Swan. Even Zeus, the company’s eight-ton, two-million-dollar remote-controlled deep-sea robot, which is used for lifting treasure from the ocean floor, had been partly dismantled.

The next day, the “Today” show ran footage shot from a storm-tossed dinghy that had followed the Explorer into the bay, and the Times of London reported that “a Spanish warship threatened to open fire on American treasure hunters yesterday as they tried to flee Gibraltar in the battle for a haul of gold and silver coins estimated to be worth half a billion dollars.” Odyssey’s dispute with Spain is likely to unfold not on the high seas, however, but in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, where the company is based. In May, a lawyer representing Spain—James Goold, a specialist in maritime law at Covington & Burling, in Washington, D.C.—filed a claim with the court on the Black Swan treasure. Two months later, Odyssey sued Spain for five million dollars in damages.

The United Nations estimates that there are more than three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor. For years, much of the bounty salvaged by treasure hunters was recovered from wrecks in shallow water with the help of scuba divers. This changed in the mid-eighties, with the advent of remotely operated vehicles, or R.O.V.s: robots equipped with lights, cameras, steering thrusters, and arms that can lift objects from depths as great as a mile.

As more submerged artifacts become accessible, countries have begun to challenge the “finders keepers” concept that has traditionally governed salvage operations. In 2001, the UNESCO General Conference adopted a Convention for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, which seeks to thwart the activities of treasure hunters by prohibiting them from selling artifacts that are more than a hundred years old. The convention has yet to take effect, but laws already exist that grant nations “sovereign immunity” over, or ownership of, their sunken warships in international waters. Lately, countries have successfully invoked these laws in court. In 2000, Spain claimed the rights to two warships, La Galga and the Juno, which sank off the coast of Virginia in 1750 and 1802, respectively, and were salvaged by Sea Hunt, an American treasure-hunting company. Sea Hunt was compelled by court order to return the bounty—anchors, silver coins, and gold nuggets—to Spain and was denied a share of its value. (Until then, it was standard for the salvor to receive a substantial percentage of a retrieved treasure’s value, provided that ownership of the ship was not in dispute.) If the Black Swan turns out to be a Spanish warship, Odyssey could be obliged to surrender its haul to Spain.

The arrival of treasure hunters in the deepest parts of the ocean has also caused increasing concern among nautical archeologists. Some of these specialists, who study shipwrecks and their cargo, have accused treasure hunters of destroying wreck sites in search of valuables and criticized them for selling salvaged artifacts to the public—as Odyssey routinely does—through auction houses, Web sites, and home-shopping channels. George Bass, the founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, at Texas A. & M. University, has conducted ten shipwreck excavations in the past forty years; he has spent decades sifting recovered debris for clues to the past. “What treasure hunter is going to spend thirty years doing that if they have to sell the stuff off very quickly to pay off their investors?” Bass asked me.

Odyssey, the country’s only publicly traded deep-sea treasure-hunting company, which was founded in 1994 by Greg Stemm, an advertising executive, and John Morris, a real-estate developer, has sought to distinguish itself from other such firms by working with archeologists to excavate wrecks and by forming partnerships with governments—few of which seem willing to spend millions of dollars on R.O.V.s and other technology necessary for salvaging their cultural heritage from the deep. Odyssey offers to shoulder the financial burden of excavations in return for a cut of the proceeds; in 2002, it made a groundbreaking deal with Britain to excavate a British warship that sank off the coast of Gibraltar in 1694 with a treasure aboard reported to be worth as much as four billion dollars. As Stemm says, “The truth is that in the largest unexplored part of our earth Odyssey does things that no government in the world can do.”

Stemm, who is fifty years old, tall and lanky, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and a toothy smile, combines a boyish manner with a bristling air of intellectual superiority. A former member of Mensa—“I scored in the highest level,” he says—he will reply to questions whose answers he deems obvious with the phrase “Yuh think?” or just “Duh!” But his enthusiasm is irrepressible. “There are these mysterious little time capsules lying on the ocean bottom,” he told me. “And that moment of discovery, when an R.O.V. first comes upon a site that nobody has ever seen before—it generates a sense of awe as you come closer and closer, and you see an artifact here and an artifact there and you see a part of a hull. It’s a magical feeling that strikes some chord deep in our soul.”

Stemm says that Odyssey sells only the mass-produced items it recovers, such as coins. Moreover, he argues, by publicizing the shipwrecks it finds—on TV specials, in books, and on its Web site—the company does more to educate people about our seafaring past than academics do. “If I were an archeologist today, I’d be saying, ‘Why aren’t we out there working with Greg Stemm and these guys?’ ” he told me. “What does the public really want here? What better curators are there on earth than the entire public? Let’s involve them all, instead of sticking everything in storerooms in the back of a museum.”

Even so, Odyssey, which has an average monthly operating budget of about two million dollars—much of it raised from large financial firms, such as GLG Partners and Strata Capital—has conducted its salvage operations with great secrecy, and allowed few independent experts to examine the wreck sites or the artifacts it has retrieved. Until January, when Goold and a representative of the Spanish government were shown a few dozen coins and other artifacts, only Odyssey employees had been permitted to see the Black Swan treasure, which the company says is being held at an “undisclosed location” in the United States.

Secrecy pervades nearly every aspect of Odyssey’s business. A bank of video cameras and a sign declaring “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” greet visitors to the firm’s headquarters, a featureless two-story building in a corporate park near the Tampa airport. Stemm’s office—in January, he became Odyssey’s C.E.O. and chairman of the board, after Morris, who has been battling cancer, resigned from the firm—can be entered only by punching a security code into a keypad. During my first meeting with Stemm, last September, Odyssey’s public-relations manager, Natja Igney, recorded our conversation. (Igney also attended my meetings with Odyssey’s staff members, a necessary precaution, she explained, to insure that employees did not inadvertently divulge proprietary information.) On the walls of Stemm’s office were framed photographs, including one of the comedian Bob Hope, for whom Stemm once worked as an advance man, and another, inscribed “To my pal Greg,” of Lee Atwater, the late Republican political strategist, playing an electric guitar. (Stemm met Atwater in the late eighties, when Stemm was a director of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, a networking group that he started with two dozen other young businessmen, including Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, and Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive.)

The son of an insurance agent and a pet-shop owner, Stemm was born in Florida but grew up in Michigan. As a child, he was an avid collector. “Coins, rocks, arrowheads—you name it,” he told me. “I definitely have the collector gene, so we as a company relate to people with the collector gene.” At the age of seven, during a visit to his grandparents’ home in Lynn Haven, on Florida’s Panhandle, he suffered what he calls his “shipwreck.” He was on a shark-fishing expedition in the Gulf of Mexico with his grandfather, an engineer, when their boat capsized. Stemm’s grandfather drowned and was carried off by the current. Stemm clung to the overturned boat for hours, before being rescued by fishermen. He has presented the story, along with a love of history and archeology, as an explanation for his choice of profession.

Stemm studied marine biology at New College, in Sarasota, but he dropped out after two years, when he was hired by Bob Hope. He left that job after a year and became a freelance marketing and events consultant. “I said, ‘Man, I can do this,’ ” Stemm told me. “I understand promotion. I understand how to put things in writing that people react to.” In 1984, at a bar in Bradenton, Florida, he met Laurie DeFrain, a graphic artist, who was also from Michigan. They began dating and eventually started an advertising agency in Tampa. (The couple, who have two teen-age sons, married in 2005.)

DeFrain introduced Stemm to John Morris, a client who owned a local real-estate-development firm. Together, they started a real-estate company. “John is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met,” Stemm said. “I can win a debate with most people, but I can never win a debate with John.” In 1986, Stemm learned that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington was auctioning off an eighty-five-foot research ship, the Seahawk, worth eight hundred thousand dollars. On a whim, he bid a hundred thousand dollars of company money and won the boat. Stemm and Morris contemplated renting it out for parties, but before they got around to it they were approached by a salesman from Deep Ocean Engineering, a company that had helped to pioneer the use of R.O.V.s. Until then, the robots had been used primarily by oil companies, for construction, drilling, and laying underwater pipelines. Deep Ocean Engineering wanted to demonstrate that the technology could help identify shipwrecks, and had a potential client who believed that he had located a wreck in the Gulf of Mexico. Stemm and Morris agreed to provide the Seahawk for the expedition. No wreck was found, but afterward Stemm and Morris bought five small R.O.V.s, for about fifty thousand dollars each. They rented the robots to the Navy, which used them for practicing mine countermeasures, and began working with insurance companies that were suspicious of claimants whose boats had sunk in deep water. Stemm and Morris, assisted by the R.O.V.s, photographed the boats to determine whether they had been stripped of their electronics—possible evidence that they had been scuttled for the insurance money. The men called their new company, whose headquarters consisted of a few spare offices in Stemm’s ad agency, Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology.

In 1987, Stemm attended an archeology conference in Reno, where he met Robert Marx, a veteran treasure hunter and the author of more than sixty popular books on shipwrecks and maritime history. When Marx learned that Seahawk owned R.O.V.s, he told Stemm that in 1965, in the Dry Tortugas—a group of seven islands near the Florida Keys—deep-sea shrimp fishermen had shown him pots that they had caught in their nets and which Marx recognized as seventeenth-century Spanish olive jars. In the early nineteen-seventies, Marx said, he had searched the site with a dragnet and retrieved a huge anchor, which slipped off his cable and plunged back into the deep. The anchor, he told Stemm, was evidence that below lay the wreck of a Spanish treasure galleon—probably one from a famous fleet of twenty-eight that had been caught in a hurricane in 1622, shortly after setting sail from Havana. In 1985, Mel Fisher, a treasure hunter based in Key West, had found one of the ships, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, along with four hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of gold and silver, thirty-five miles east of the Dry Tortugas site. Marx proposed to sell the site’s location to Seahawk for ten thousand dollars in cash and a ten-per-cent cut of any profits. Stemm accepted the offer. “I’d read a lot of Marx’s books by then,” he told me. “He seemed to be a guy who knew what he was talking about.”

In October, 1988, Stemm, Morris, DeFrain, and Stemm’s younger brother, Scott, left Tampa on the Seahawk carrying a map of the Dry Tortugas on which Marx had drawn an “X.” Scott, a fireman, had been enlisted to operate the boat’s main search tool, a side-scan sonar: a three-foot-long torpedo-shaped sensor that is dragged behind a boat, close to the ocean floor, and uses sound waves to detect “anomalies” on the bottom. Within twenty minutes, the side scan picked up an anomaly, but the group was too inexperienced to recognize it as a shipwreck. Over the course of three months, the Seahawk combed the ocean floor, tacking back and forth across an area ten miles square—a process known as “mowing the lawn.” In January, with James Whitaker, an experienced side-scan technician, on board, the group returned to the site of the original anomaly. Whitaker’s measurements indicated that the wreck was about sixty feet long, too short to be a treasure galleon. Whitaker also thought that the wreck’s “boxy” shape, as he later testified, “looked more like a barge.” Stemm, however, argued that a substantial portion of the ship could be hidden under the sand, and he and Morris resolved to return to the site with an R.O.V. This would be costly, since the wreck lay at fifteen hundred feet—deeper than the height of the Empire State Building. To examine it would require a larger, far more expensive R.O.V. than the ones Stemm and Morris owned. The operation would cost ten thousand dollars a day.

Up to this point, Stemm and Morris had funded the hunt with small investments from friends and relatives, who were promised a percentage of any profits. They now decided that the best way to raise a large amount of money quickly was to take Seahawk public. Morris met with brokers at Kober Financial Corporation, in Tampa, a firm that had access to a “blind pool” company. (Contributors to a blind pool allow brokers to decide how to invest their money.) Morris told the brokers that he and Stemm conceived of treasure hunting as a sustainable business rather than as a get-rich-quick scheme; they would not only excavate shipwrecks and sell some of their finds to the public but also auction off film rights to the wrecks, sell tickets to shipwreck-themed “attractions,” and publish books and magazine articles. “It was in the business plan from the beginning, the way this all fit together,” Stemm told me. Kober agreed to negotiate a merger between Seahawk and the blind-pool company, which had half a million dollars in its pool. After the merger, Seahawk became the country’s first publicly financed treasure-hunting company, and its stock began trading for half a penny a share. Stemm and Morris acquired sixty million shares each.

In mid-April, 1989, the men returned to the Dry Tortugas site with a new R.O.V., which beamed grainy black-and-white images from the sea bottom onto a monitor aboard the Seahawk. Morris and Stemm saw some broken timbers, and then a pile of round clay objects—olive jars of the kind that Marx had described. The R.O.V. also transmitted images of a heavily corroded bell, which Stemm thought resembled one retrieved from the Atocha, and several rectangular objects that he later said he thought were “possible silver bars.” Seahawk subsequently retrieved three astrolabes, sophisticated navigational devices that Stemm’s research suggested would be found only on a treasure galleon.

Stemm had read accounts of the 1622 disaster, all of which mentioned only three treasure galleons that had been lost in the storm: the Atocha, the Rosario, and the Santa Margarita. All three had since been found, in shallow water, but Stemm believed that a fourth galleon might also have gone down. He cited a book called “The Treasure Galleons: Clues to Millions in Sunken Gold and Silver,” published in 1971 by a wreck diver named Dave Horner, who had spent years researching Spain’s treasure fleets in the marine archives in Seville. In a chapter on the 1622 disaster, Horner asserted that four million pesos had been lost on the ships that disappeared during the hurricane. Stemm knew that 1.9 million pesos had been on the Atocha, the Santa Margarita, and the Rosario. “So what that tells you,” he later testified, “is there’s still 2.1 million pesos in treasure lost.” If another ship in the fleet had sunk, he said, “then you would assume or deduce that that ship must have had 2.1 million pesos in treasure on it.”

Stemm had a name for the ship that he believed may have been carrying the treasure: the Nuestra Señora de la Merced, which, according to Horner’s book, had set off from Havana in 1622 carrying sixty per cent more gold and silver than the Atocha. Horner offered no details about what had happened to the ship, but Stemm, who could find no record of the Merced’s having reached Spain or having returned to Havana after the hurricane (as other ships in the fleet had done), speculated that it may have sunk in deep water. Perhaps, Stemm later testified, the fate of the ship had not been recorded in any contemporaneous documents because there had been no eyewitnesses to the sinking.

On April 25th, after returning from the wreck site in the Dry Tortugas, Stemm appeared with Morris on a Tampa television station, to discuss their find: a Spanish ship, possibly carrying, in today’s currency, as a reporter at the station put it, “up to eight hundred million dollars”—a treasure without precedent. According to investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which later charged Seahawk with fraud, on the day of the broadcast someone at the company phoned Kober and told the brokers about the discovery. After watching the evening news, the brokers began phoning customers, and Kober became, as one employee later told S.E.C. lawyers, a “madhouse.” The brokers sold Seahawk stock until 1 A.M., driving up the stock price sixfold, from three cents to nineteen cents a share.

Soon, reporters began calling Seahawk, and Stemm and Morris hired Daniel Bagley, an associate professor of mass communications at the University of South Florida, to manage the press. Bagley arranged for stories to appear in national and foreign news outlets, including USA Today and the London Daily Telegraph, and on the “Today” show. The Times reported that “records show” that the Dry Tortugas ship could have been carrying “a multimillion-dollar treasure.” A follow-up article added, “Some archeologists said the wreck might be the most important undersea archeological find in the Western Hemisphere.”

Preparations to excavate the wreck took more than a year. In January, 1990, Stemm and Morris hired David Moore, a thirty-four-year-old nautical archeologist, to oversee scientific aspects of the salvage operation. Moore had earned a master’s degree in maritime history and nautical archeology from East Carolina University in 1989, and for five years had worked with Mel Fisher, on the Atocha excavation and other Spanish colonial wrecks. “I was looking for experience,” Moore told me, explaining why he had agreed to assist a treasure hunter. “And to get an up-close-and-personal view of what all the controversy was about—this treasure-hunting-versus-archeology crap. I said, ‘Rather than sit here in this ivory tower, let’s get out there and get my hands dirty and see if they are the devils incarnate that people claim them to be.’ ”

In May, Moore and two dozen Seahawk employees arrived at the Dry Tortugas site in a recovery ship that Stemm and Morris had bought and equipped with a two-million-dollar R.O.V., which they nicknamed Merlin. The team spent weeks passing Merlin over the site, and took thousands of pictures that would later be used to create a record of the location of every visible artifact. Then the team began using specialized dredges to suck sand away from the wreck. According to Moore, the technicians operating the R.O.V. were eager to position it over areas where they believed gold lay. “I kept reminding them, ‘You do not want to set this two-ton R.O.V. down on the sand, in an area where we don’t know what’s down there,’ ” Moore told me. (Moore says that he determined that the R.O.V. had already crushed a dozen ancient olive jars, valued at twelve thousand dollars each.) In early June, the team saw something unusual on the seabed. “It was the edge of a gold bar that was just barely visible coming out of the sand,” Moore recalled. “We sucked a bit of sand away and picked it up and brought it to the surface.” It was a six-inch-long gold ingot, known as a finger bar, stamped with several circular markings.

Seahawk immediately issued a press release. Citing Robert Marx as an authority, the company declared that the stamps indicated that the bar was “documented gold of the Spanish crown.” The next day, the Times reported that the ingot was the “strongest evidence yet that the ship is a treasure-laden Spanish galleon from a fabled, ill-fortuned fleet that set sail from Havana in 1622.” Seahawk’s stock rose to an all-time high of just under eighty-five cents a share.

Moore, however, was worried. He believed that the markings on the gold bar were routine tax stamps, suggesting that its owner had paid taxes on the gold to the Spanish king. The bar was probably privately owned and could have been carried by a crew member or a passenger on a variety of vessels. Moore doubted that the wreck was the Merced, a ship supposedly larger than the Atocha. “The Atocha’s frames were nine, nine and a half inches wide,” Moore told me. “I said, ‘The frames on this thing are about six and a half to seven inches; there’s no way this ship can be bigger than Atocha.’ ” Moreover, apart from Horner’s book, which listed the Merced as one of eight treasure galleons in the 1622 fleet, Moore could find no record that the ship had ever existed.

In mid-July, Moore stated these concerns to Stemm and Morris in a “preliminary site analysis,” and entreated his employers to consider that a loss of gold and silver in the amount that Horner claimed was aboard the Merced “would have created quite a ripple in official correspondence.” Speculating that Horner had misunderstood the use of the word merced (“gift”), which appears twice in Spanish documents about the 1622 fleet, Moore noted that “Merced doesn’t even appear to have been a popular ship’s name”; it occurred just once in a database that he had compiled of a thousand Spanish ships of the period.

Stemm later testified that he read Moore’s report, but, believing its findings to be incorrect, decided not to share it with investors, brokers, or journalists. Nevertheless, the prospectus that Seahawk provided to potential investors included a disclaimer about the wreck (“Some writers have speculated that it might be the Merced, with incredible amounts of wealth. That’s a possibility, but we are not counting on it”), and Stemm hired researchers to search the Seville archives for references to the ship. (They found none.) Robert Marx, who was working as a consultant on the project, was dispatched to Spain, and in late October he sent a fax to Stemm in which he wrote that he was “certain” that the wreck was not a treasure galleon but, rather, one of two merchant ships that had gone down with the fleet.

That winter, Seahawk moved into a seventeen-thousand-square-foot facility in Tampa, which included corporate offices, conservation labs, and galleries for displaying artifacts that the company retrieved from the Dry Tortugas site. (These eventually included nearly three dozen gold bars and fragments, more than a thousand silver coins, pearls, olive jars, ceramics, and musket balls.) Seahawk also leased a ten-thousand-square-foot building in St. Petersburg and hired architects to turn it into a museum devoted to shipwrecks and underwater treasure. Not until July, 1991, when reports appeared in the Tampa papers that the S.E.C. had begun an investigation of Seahawk, did the company issue a press release stating that the Dry Tortugas wreck was probably a “moderate-size merchant vessel” and that the Merced “may not have existed.” The announcement triggered a sell-off of Seahawk shares. The stock price tumbled to six cents and, eventually, to a penny. In December, an analysis commissioned by the S.E.C. concluded that the artifacts recovered from the Dry Tortugas had a market value of a little more than a million dollars—less than what Seahawk had spent to salvage them. (An appraisal by Seahawk at around this time valued the artifacts at five million dollars.)

The S.E.C. was particularly interested in Stemm’s and Morris’s trading of Seahawk stock. A day after the Times story appeared trumpeting the news of the gold bar retrieved from the Dry Tortugas wreck, Stemm sold four hundred thousand shares, worth two hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars. Morris and Bagley, Seahawk’s director of public relations, also sold stock and, according to the S.E.C., all three men realized returns of, “in some cases, over 3,000 percent.” In late 1994, the S.E.C. charged Seahawk with fraud and inflating, in S.E.C. filings, the value of artifacts recovered from the wreck. In addition, Stemm, Morris, and Bagley were charged with a total of twenty-two counts of fraud and insider trading.

The S.E.C. offered Seahawk a deal: it would drop the charges against the company if Stemm, Morris, and Bagley resigned, and Seahawk agreed never again to employ them or to use company money to pay their legal fees. The three men decided to fight the charges against them in court. (Seahawk has since ceased operations.)

The men’s trial, which began in November, 1997, in U.S. District Court in Tampa, lasted three weeks. Morris and Bagley testified, as did experts on Spanish coins and artifacts, marine archeology, securities trading, and the interpretation of side-scan sonar readings. Stemm was the star witness. He told me that the S.E.C. investigation and the trial were “among the worst ordeals” he has endured, but court records suggest that his performance on the stand was extraordinary. For three days, in testimony that spans more than four hundred and fifty pages in the court transcript, he parried questions and repeatedly thwarted the S.E.C.’s lead prosecutor, Peter Bresnan. At one point, Bresnan grilled Stemm about his announcement on Tampa television that Seahawk had found “silver bars” at the wreck site. The bars turned out to be worthless firebricks.

BRESNAN: And you never informed the public of the fact that what you had previously thought were silver bars were actually bricks, did you?

STEMM: That’s kind of a trick question. Of course we informed them, because every time we found something we announced what we found. So if you followed the list of what we found, and we never found firebricks, then you would have been told that we didn’t find firebricks. We didn’t make it a practice to announce what we didn’t find. We announced what we did find.

BRESNAN: You never—

STEMM: Does that make sense?

BRESNAN: It may.

Bresnan had no better luck questioning Stemm about his failure to make public Moore’s preliminary site analysis. “I never informed anybody of information that I thought was wrong,” Stemm said. “I think it’s pretty simple. When I thought that logic was flawed or historical data was flawed, I simply wouldn’t pass it out. I thought that was being pretty responsible.” Bresnan tried to get Stemm to explain why he had sold all but sixty thousand of his more than sixty-one million shares of company stock just before Seahawk revealed to the public that the wreck was probably a small merchant vessel. Stemm diverted the exchange into a long, complicated argument about the meaning of “beneficial stock.”

The jury found the defendants not guilty on all counts. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Stemm told me. In 1994, after resigning from Seahawk, he and Morris founded another treasure-hunting company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, which they took public in August, 1997. “A number of the primary initial investors in Seahawk, as soon as we won the S.E.C., came right back into Odyssey,” Stemm recalled. The company pursued leads on several shipwrecks, including H.M.S. Sussex, an eighty-cannon British warship that had led a fleet of allied ships from Gibraltar in February, 1694. The fleet, which included ships from Spain and Holland, was preparing for battle against France, but it was caught in a storm and sank. The Sussex lost all but two of its five hundred crew members.

Stemm has said that Odyssey learned about the Sussex in 1995, when a researcher showed him and Morris a copy of a three-hundred-year-old letter to an official in the court of Louis XIV from the French consul in Livorno, Italy. The letter described the loss of the allied fleet and mentioned that a large sum of money—a million pounds sterling—had been on the Sussex when it sank. “That one simple letter set us down the path,” Stemm later told the Sunday Telegraph. Odyssey hired researchers to examine archives in England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States, and concluded that the money was a bribe from England intended for the Duke of Savoy, a wavering ally who controlled a region of southern France that provided an important invasion route.

In 1998, Odyssey, with the consent of the British government, began to search for the Sussex. (As a warship, the Sussex was British property.) But it wasn’t until four years later that the two parties agreed on a salvage deal: Odyssey would pay for the salvage in return for eighty per cent of the first forty-five million dollars recovered, fifty per cent of the next four hundred and fifty-five million, and forty per cent of anything above that amount. Odyssey also obtained permission from Spain authorizing the company to search near Gibraltar, in what it considered to be Spanish waters, on the condition that the Ministry of Culture be notified of any finds other than the Sussex.

In September, 2001, Odyssey’s side-scan sonar detected an anomaly east of Gibraltar. Five months later, the Times, in a front-page story by William Broad, reported that “a team of entrepreneurs and archaeologists working with the British government says it has probably discovered the Sussex,” a ship possibly carrying some “10 tons of gold or more than 100 tons of silver,” perhaps “worth up to $4 billion today.” The evidence suggesting that there was treasure aboard the Sussex, Broad wrote, included a document from 1693, which stated, “A great summ of money is sending hence for Savoy,” and an entry in “the royal proceedings of Dec. 12, 1693,” in which England’s King William III “ordered the exchequer to give the flotilla ‘a million of money,’ or one million pounds sterling in coins.” The next day, Odyssey’s stock more than doubled, from ninety cents to $1.93. Broad wrote about the company again in May, 2003, reporting in the Times that “no problems are foreseen” with the salvage of the vessel.

That fall, Odyssey purchased the Explorer and the custom-designed R.O.V., Zeus, and began excavating a wreck off the coast of Georgia: the SS Republic, a steamship that had sunk in a hurricane in 1865, while transporting money and passengers from New York to New Orleans after the Civil War. Press reports estimated the value of the Republic treasure at a hundred and eighty million dollars, though Odyssey later revised this figure to seventy-five million. By 2005, the company’s investors included several financial firms, among them Fortress Investment Group and Galleon Group.

By this time, however, doubts about the company’s claim to have found the Sussex had begun to circulate. One skeptic was Jim McManus, a sixty-three-year-old ship’s captain, commercial diver, and marine-archeology buff. In July, 2006, McManus and two friends—John Bartram, a former television producer and amateur historian in Britain, and Vincent Burrows, an archeologist—launched a Web site called Historyhuntersinternational.org. The History Hunters had read news reports about Odyssey’s deal with the British government, and they decided to conduct their own research on the Sussex. Photographs of the wreck site that Odyssey had released in 2001 showed a pile of debris that McManus believed was not big enough to be the Sussex. “It’s barely wide enough to be the Sussex before she collapsed,” he told me. “Ships can spread out to the sides when they sink. So the signature of the wreck is usually much, much larger than the ship was in real life.” McManus also studied a photograph taken by Odyssey of an anchor at the site and concluded that it was too small to belong to the Sussex and the wrong shape for a British anchor of the period. Moreover, he thought that there weren’t enough cannons scattered around the site—nineteen were visible in the site maps that Odyssey released—given that Sussex had been an eighty-gun warship.

McManus and Bartram searched the archives of the Exchequer and of Parliament in the British Library but found no record of a million pounds sterling being aboard the Sussex. “You have to understand that in those days the entire operating budget for the Navy amounted to only a few million pounds,” McManus told me. “Now, to lose a million pounds in gold coin on a ship? That’s a pretty significant punch in the treasury.” Bartram believed that Odyssey had made an error interpreting the historical documents. The company had relied in part on diaries compiled by scribes in the court of William III, which, as quoted by William Broad in the Times, indicated that the King had ordered the Exchequer to “give the flotilla ‘a million of money.’ ” However, a subsequent article in the Sunday Telegraph included the rest of the sentence that Broad had cited: “Days before the Sussex left Portsmouth, the royal proceedings of December 12, 1693 recorded that King William had ordered the exchequer to issue ‘a million pounds in money for the use of the Fleet.’ ” The phrase “for the use of the fleet” is routine language used in parliamentary proceedings to refer to appropriations for the British Navy (“the fleet”). Thus, Bartram concluded, “They read a payment to the King for the Navy as a payment by the King to Savoy.”

In August, 2006, McManus and Bartram began to post their opinions about the Sussex on the History Hunters’ Web site. Four months later, the site crashed. The History Hunters determined that sophisticated hackers were attacking the site, repeatedly shutting it down. “One of the clever things they’d done, which my security people hadn’t seen before, was to join as a member of History Hunters, then post messages to each other within the internal messaging system,” Bartram told me. “But, instead of sending messages, they were sending code.” Bartram said that the attacks ceased two months to the day after they began, evidence, he believes, that the hackers had been hired on a contract. “And who would pay to hack a little Web site like History Hunters?” Bartram said. “No one—unless they’ve got a commercial motive.” (Stemm denied that Odyssey had hired the hackers. “We would never engage in, nor endorse in any way, creating any problem for anyone’s Web site, no matter how critical they might be of Odyssey,” he wrote in an e-mail.)

Stemm repeatedly assured me that Odyssey had proof of the Sussex’s treasure cargo that had not been reported by the media, and he promised to show it to me. In December, he and his wife came to New York to attend the première of the Disney film “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” (Odyssey had negotiated with Disney to sponsor an online contest tied to the movie, and artifacts from the SS Republic were being sold as part of a “Real ‘National Treasure’ Collectors’ Set,” for nineteen hundred and ninety-five dollars, on the company’s Web site.) I met Stemm in the restaurant of his hotel, where he handed me a book that had Odyssey’s logo and the word “Confidential” stamped on its cover. “There’s stuff that the British treasury department has on Sussex that they won’t even show to me,” he said. “So, I mean, what you’re going to see in this book isn’t the only evidence we were going on.” Stemm left me alone to look at the book, saying that he would return in an hour.

The book included photocopied pages from the “Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series” and the “Calendar of Treasury Books,” diaries by William III’s scribes. On one page, an arrow pointed at a passage containing these words: “Yesterday a warrant passed the privy seal for paying a million of money out of the Exchequer for the use of the fleet.” The excerpt made no mention of the Sussex or of Savoy. There was also a copy of a page from a book called “A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September, 1678 to April, 1714,” by Narcissus Luttrell, who, like Samuel Pepys, kept a record of the daily events in Parliament. Luttrell’s entry for November 18, 1693, read, “A great summ of money is sending hence for Savoy.” There was no reference to the Sussex.

Toward the back of the book was a copy of the Livorno letter—the original inspiration for Odyssey’s interest in the Sussex—along with an English translation. The letter, which was addressed to a Monseigneur Pontchartrain, an official in Louis XIV’s court, was a newsy account of recent developments in the war with England, and a passage at the end described the storm that had struck the enemy fleet the previous month:

But the storm worsened and the admiral warship of the English fleet was lost, along with its 90 cannons and 500 crew, of which only two Moors survived. In addition, this vessel carried a million piastres, of which 800,000 were for the Duke of Savoy and the rest for the Marquis de Leganez and other individuals.

This passage, Stemm had told me, was among the best evidence that the Sussex carried a million pounds sterling in its hold when it sank. But the passage could be proof that there was considerably less treasure on board. The term “piastres”—used throughout Europe at the time to denote pieces of eight, basic units of Spanish currency—varied in value from country to country. The Livorno letter was written in French to the French court by a French-speaking official, and, as Odyssey admitted in the book, “In that period, the French, Spanish and Italian coins were valued at just under one-fourth of an English pound sterling.”

Whether there is a four-billion-dollar treasure aboard the wreck that Odyssey has discovered—and whether the wreck is the Sussex—will be resolved only when the company salvages the ship. But, more than four years after the Times asserted that the excavation was expected to proceed, only a few artifacts have been retrieved. Andalusia, an autonomous region of southern Spain, disputed the Spanish government’s deal with Odyssey, asserting that its authorization was necessary for the company to work in waters off southern Spain. The project remained tangled in diplomatic red tape until a year ago, when Odyssey announced that Andalusia would appoint Spanish archeologists to observe the salvage operation aboard the Explorer, at which point the excavation would go forward.

Yet, two months later, on May 18, 2007, Odyssey announced the recovery of seventeen tons of coins not from the Sussex but from the ship code-named the Black Swan. At the time of the find, Stemm was reading the financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan”—Taleb borrows the term from Karl Popper to describe improbable events of great impact. “I knew when I was thinking about the code name that it was going to be world famous,” Stemm told me. “And the treasure is a perfect ‘black swan’—one of those things that no one thought was possible. Everybody was focussed on the Sussex. They were all talking about that and then—boom! We dropped seventeen tons of silver on the table!”

On May 19th, the Times heralded “what may be the richest undersea treasure recovery to date,” and Odyssey’s stock climbed briefly to an unprecedented high of $9.45 a share. In Spain, the reaction was less enthusiastic. The Ministry of Culture issued a press release stating that the treasure could be Spanish or have been removed from Spanish waters. Rumors circulated in the Spanish press that Odyssey had broken its agreement to allow Spanish archeologists to oversee the excavation of the Sussex and, using a code name, had spirited the Sussex treasure to America. Several articles suggested that the treasure came from the Merchant Royal, an English ship that had been lost off Land’s End, near Cornwall, in September, 1641, reportedly carrying, among other valuables, a large payment intended for Spanish troops serving in Belgium. (Under the terms of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, of 1976—which holds that property of a foreign nation is immune from claims in the United States, unless it is in the country as part of a commerical operation—Spain could pursue a claim to the treasure.)

The day after Odyssey announced the find, Spain’s American lawyer, James Goold, sent a letter to a lawyer for Odyssey, requesting information about the identity of the Black Swan. He received no reply. (Odyssey denied receiving such a letter.) In late May, Goold filed an ownership claim on the Black Swan treasure in Spain’s name at the U.S. District Court in Tampa. He also requested detailed information about the artifacts recovered from the site. Odyssey demanded that Spain first agree to abide by a “protective order”—a confidentiality agreement that would forbid the Spanish government from sharing the information with anyone. Spain refused “for a whole bunch of reasons,” Goold told me. He said that the order did not state what information Odyssey would agree to disclose and that it carried provisos that Spain considered draconian. “All information would be provided to only one particular authority in Spain,” Goold said. “I couldn’t show it to experts; if I showed it to the Ministry of Culture, then the Navy couldn’t see it, and so on.”

In July, Spain successfully petitioned Britain to release copies of the export documents that Odyssey had filed when it flew the Black Swan treasure from Gibraltar to America. These stated that the ship’s cargo—including hundreds of buckets of Spanish coins—had been recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, two hundred miles west of Gibraltar. Several Spanish historians quickly surmised that the wreck was not the Sussex or the Merchant Royal but, rather, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish Navy ship that had been sunk by British warships in 1804 as it was returning to Seville from South America with more than a million silver and gold coins in its hold. Odyssey said that it could neither confirm nor deny this theory, and, by last fall, after the Guardia Civil briefly arrested Odyssey’s ship, the Explorer, with twelve journalists, including me, aboard, a protracted court battle between Spain and Odyssey over the Black Swan seemed inevitable. (The excavation of the supposed Sussex was suspended indefinitely.)

After the History Hunters’ Web site crashed, in late 2006, Jim McManus started posting his findings about Odyssey on a Yahoo Finance message board, where Odyssey investors regularly congregate to discuss the company, often in optimistic terms. “I now have no clue how high this could go,” one Odyssey watcher wrote the day after the company announced the Black Swan find and its stock climbed above nine dollars. “$30 might actually be a reasonable prospect, but $50 if you factor in future earnings, the lack of any competition and the fact that there’s literally thousands of billions of dollars (Is that trillions!) worth of lost cargo now looking very exposed on the sea bed.” McManus, writing under the alias Doc, gleefully recounted the details of the battle between Odyssey and Spain over the Black Swan and ridiculed the claim that the treasure was worth five hundred million dollars. Photographs that Odyssey released of Stemm with the Black Swan hoard suggested to McManus that the coins were not rare hand-stamped seventeenth-century “cob coins”—what the Merchant Royal would have carried—but machine-made pieces, probably from the early eighteen-hundreds, and thus of far less value to collectors.

McManus also revealed details of lucrative sales of Odyssey stock by the company’s directors. S.E.C. filings, available online, showed that in the days after the stock reached $9.45 John Morris had sold $1.36 million in shares; his brother David, the company’s secretary and treasurer, sold $708,500, and George Becker, Jr., who was then Odyssey’s executive vice-president, sold $402,750. “Why would anyone holding this ‘Extremely Valuable Stock’ sell even one share when it will go to $20?????” McManus asked in one post. “You certainly wouldn’t believe an Insider who knows the real story would sell now would you? LOL Doc.” He ended his posts with the recommendation “Strong Sell.”

Last September, Odyssey filed a libel and defamation suit against McManus, accusing him of making “false, disparaging and damaging comments regarding Odyssey, its business, management personnel, and recovery efforts.” Stemm told me that McManus was “making stuff up. As a responsible move for our shareholders, we had no choice but to sue him.” (McManus denied that he knowingly published false information. “I referenced everything,” he told me.) In early November, the Times of London published an article about several Odyssey executives’ stock sales, which added a new detail: on the export documents filed in Gibraltar the company had estimated the coins’ worth at far less than five hundred million dollars. (Odyssey had assigned them a value of just under four million dollars.) The Times headline was provocative: “SUNKEN TREASURE ‘OVERVALUED TO LIFT SHARES OF SALVAGE FIRM.’ ”

Three days after the story appeared, I met with Stemm; his wife, Laurie; and his sons at a restaurant in Tampa. Stemm was dressed in a blue Hawaiian-style shirt, jeans, and Top-Siders, his silvering hair neatly blow-dried. “If we hadn’t been through the S.E.C. thing, then I’d think this was really tough, what we’re going through with Spain,” he said. “One man’s nightmare is another man’s adventure; it comes with the territory.” He dismissed Spain’s efforts to claim the Black Swan treasure. “They are just bumbling around,” he said. “Just embarrassing themselves. First they said the Black Swan was the Sussex, then they said it was the Merchant Royal, and now they’re saying we found it in Spanish waters—or it’s the Mercedes.” He insisted that Odyssey had not yet been able to identify the ship with certainty and that it meant nothing that there were Spanish coins on board. “During the colonial period, reals and escudos were as ubiquitous as present-day American dollars,” he said. “They could have come from any ship of the time.”

Stemm had repeatedly told me that every search Odyssey undertakes is preceded by detailed research into a particular ship’s history, cargo, and likely wreck site. Yet he implied that the Black Swan find was unexpected, a notion that was echoed, at dinner, by Laurie, who alluded to the “randomness” of the discovery.

“Well, no,” Stemm interrupted. “We had a research area staked out.”

“So you knew what you were looking for,” I said.

Stemm waved his hand dismissively. “There were several potential shipwrecks in the area that we were looking for,” he said.

Even if the Black Swan turned out to be a Spanish ship, Odyssey would still get a salvage award from the court, he went on. “And those are generally up to ninety per cent of the recovered treasure.” (According to Goold, salvage awards this large are extremely rare.)

Stemm insisted that there was nothing unusual about the disparity between the half-billion-dollar valuation of the Black Swan treasure initially posted on Odyssey’s Web site and the four million dollars that the company had cited on the export forms. The latter figure, he explained, reflected the cost of recovering the coins from the sea: “We’re required by the government to put a value that accounts for the amount of money we spent finding and bringing the coins up. That figure has nothing to do with what we’ll actually sell them for, after marketing and advertising them. I mean, it’d be like someone getting angry that an oil painting costs five thousand dollars when the paint itself cost only a hundred and twenty-five!”

Nor, Stemm said, was there anything suspicious about the timing of Morris’s stock sales. “That was all done perfectly legally,” he said. “He sold nine per cent of his position. He made about a million bucks. I mean, after twenty years with the company. You know?” He went on, “I mean, I just sold some shares last week. About a hundred and sixty-five thousand—about nine per cent of my position.” (In 2006, Stemm’s salary was three hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, and last year he received a bonus of two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in cash and eighty-seven thousand shares in Odyssey stock. In the ten years since the company went public, it has been profitable in only two, 2003 and 2004, when it sold valuable coins from the Republic; it operates at a loss of, on average, nearly twenty million dollars a year.)

Stemm says that a love of science, not a desire for profit, compelled him to found Odyssey. “Archeology is my passion,” he told me several times, and he argued that the company’s scientific work is of higher quality than that of some of the most respected archeological institutions. He urged me to visit the company’s conservation lab, where two staffers were cleaning artifacts from the Republic; they were leaching saline from pottery in baths of water and removing encrustations from a cannon using electrolysis. Some scholars argue that Odyssey’s methods betray a fundamental misunderstanding of marine archeology. “Finding, raising, and conserving artifacts is no more archeology than my aunt’s careful collecting of Indian arrowheads on her South Carolina farm,” George Bass, of Texas A. & M., told me. In the late nineteen-seventies, Bass and a team of specialists excavated an eleventh-century wreck off the southern coast of Turkey. They spent years reassembling the hull from a thousand fragments of wood, and the resulting structure has provided insights into a period of shipbuilding about which little was previously known. Over three decades, conservators pieced together nearly a million fragments of glass retrieved from the wreck. These yielded beakers, cups, bowls, and bottles, and, for the first time, information about medieval Islamic glassware.

Last spring, in an essay published in the online nautical-archeology journal Shipwreck Central, James Delgado, the executive director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, at Texas A. & M., challenged Stemm to prove that Odyssey is more scientifically responsible than other treasure-hunting companies. “The issue is one where the flash of gold and silver obscure or overwhelm the type of careful work that yields treasures of a different sort,” Delgado wrote. “We base our opposition to treasure hunting on the track record of those years of lost opportunities and lost history, and the challenge we issue to Odyssey is to show how they are different.” In response, Stemm invited Delgado to visit Odyssey’s offices and tour the company’s conservation labs. (He has yet to do so.) Delgado told me that he was dismayed by Odyssey’s policy of selling the mass-produced artifacts—chiefly coins—that it retrieves. “Numismatists are now studying the dispersal of coin based on each individual coin and where they find it,” Delgado told me. With respect to the five hundred thousand coins found on the Black Swan, he said, scholars will wonder, Are they all the same? What do they represent? He added, “A detailed analysis of that entire collection might yield some really fascinating insights into what’s going on in minting processes, even down to the grade of silver.”

Several archeologists I spoke with, pointing out that Odyssey, like Seahawk before it, has never published any of its findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, said that they were skeptical of the company’s claim that it regards science as a priority. “It’s going to be twenty years since they salvaged the first so-called treasure,” Filipe de Castro, an assistant professor of nautical archeology at Texas A. & M., told me, referring to Seahawk’s excavation in the Dry Tortugas in the late-eighties. “They have not produced one line—one line—of information that is relevant for the history of seafaring or the history of technology, or whatever would be expected.” (Stemm told me that scientific journals have rejected papers submitted by archeologists on Odyssey’s staff, on the ground that the company is a treasure-hunting firm.)

An archeologist who briefly worked for Odyssey on a shipwreck, and agreed to speak to me on the condition that he not be identified, said that he decided to take the job despite reservations. “They were saying, ‘Everything will be done archeologically correctly; nothing will be sold; we have unlimited funding’—an ideal dream of how archeology should be done with treasure involved,” the archeologist told me. He said that he was shown Odyssey’s plan for excavating the wreck. “Their proposal was to uncover the top deck and then basically sink a shaft straight through the decks down to where they perceived the bullion is,” he said. “In the process of sinking a shaft, you’re destroying the timbers, you’re destroying the frame of the ship, you’re destroying the artifacts, and basically you’re making a mess.” The archeologist said that he resigned after it “became very clear that they only wanted the gold.” Stemm denied this account. “There are a lot of people that have claimed to have worked with us in one way or another over the years,” he wrote in an e-mail. “But the ridiculousness of claiming that we would ‘sink a shaft’ into a wreck site suggests that he might be confusing us with someone else.”

The first hearing on the Black Swan treasure was held one morning last November in the U.S. District Court in downtown Tampa. Spain had filed a motion requesting that the court compel Odyssey to disclose the identity of the Black Swan and allow Spain to inspect the treasure, or, failing that, to void the company’s claim to the wreck. The judge was Mark Pizzo, who ten years earlier had presided over the S.E.C. trial of Stemm, Morris, and Bagley. Stemm, dressed like a ship’s captain, in a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons, arrived at the second-floor courtroom, where his wife and sons, along with several Odyssey executives and directors, had already gathered. “I couldn’t decide whether to wear my Buccaneer tie,” he joked—but his eyes darted nervously to James Goold, the lawyer for Spain, a gray-haired man in a rumpled blue suit, who was arranging documents on a nearby table.

During the hearing, Goold and Odyssey’s general counsel, Melinda MacConnel, often spoke over each other in raised voices. Goold argued that it was implausible that Odyssey did not know the identity of the Black Swan. “Odyssey has made it clear they’ve done vast amounts of research,” he told Judge Pizzo. “They don’t search the Atlantic at random. They don’t search the English Channel at random. They know what these ships are. They tout that in their Web site.” MacConnel insisted that Odyssey did not know the ship’s identity and that it could not reveal the location of the site, for fear of looters. She also argued that details about the recovered artifacts must remain secret to prevent speculation in the press about the ship’s identity, which “could affect the value of our stock.”

The hearing lasted two hours. Judge Pizzo ordered the parties to work out a protective order that would prevent details about the shipwreck from falling into the wrong hands. When the hearing was over, Stemm approached Goold at his table and in a hushed voice accused him of repeating lies about Odyssey published in the Spanish press. (Stemm later told me that he had said to Goold, “That stuff you said about Odyssey plundering the coastlines of Europe: if you believe that, you’re ignorant. And if you don’t you’re dishonest.”) A lawyer for Odyssey hurried over and pulled Stemm away. (In January, on the court’s order, Odyssey revealed to Spain the wreck’s location and shared information about the artifacts. In early March, the court dismissed Odyssey’s claim for damages against Spain.)

After the hearing, I drove with Aladar Nesser, Odyssey’s director of international business development, to Stemm’s lake house, twenty-five miles north of Tampa, a handsome shingled estate with a live-in groundskeeper and a boathouse sheltering a pontoon boat, a waterskiing boat, a bass-fishing boat, a catamaran, and some kayaks and canoes. Stemm, who was waiting for us when we arrived, also owns a town house in Tampa and, with members of his extended family, a beach house in Madeira Beach. In the kitchen, he opened a bottle of red wine—“A Spanish rioja would, I think, be appropriate,” he said. Then he and Nesser, glasses in hand, walked to a screened-in porch overlooking the lake. They were soon joined by Mark Gordon, Odyssey’s president and chief operating officer. The men reviewed the events of the morning. Stemm gleefully repeated a comment that Goold had made when he alluded to the most common exception to the United States’ sovereign-immunity rule entitling governments to claim a lost ship: if the vessel is not a warship but a commercial ship. (Although the Black Swan was not found in U.S. waters, Spain claims that because Odyssey has transported treasure from the ship to Florida the rule applies.) The Spanish Navy ship the Mercedes had been used in several wars. Stemm argues, however, that when it sank it was on a nonmilitary mission, transporting freshly minted money from the New World, as well as other commercial cargo. As he put it, “The Mercedes was the FedEx of its day!” It was the closest he had come to admitting that the ship that Odyssey had found was the Mercedes.

Stemm noticed that Gordon was wearing a cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with logos from the Disney movie “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Last spring, Odyssey had used the Explorer and Zeus to sink, somewhere in the Mediterranean, a treasure chest containing fifty thousand dollars in gold coins and a key to a new Volvo—part of a treasure hunt that Disney and Volvo had arranged to promote “At World’s End,” the third installment in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series. “In the past, we were always concerned about a squeaky-clean corporate image,” Stemm said. “But people are really drawn to pirates now—look at Johnny Depp. So I mean, from a marketing standpoint, there are worse things to be associated with than pirates!” ♦